'Real people' stories clash in health care debate

Sunday

Feb 16, 2014 at 6:00 AMFeb 16, 2014 at 4:05 PM

By Jonathan Weisman The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the Republican response to the State of the Union address, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington lamented the travails of "Bette in Spokane," whose insurance policy had been canceled because of the health care law and who faced huge premium increases to replace it.

The reality for Bette Grenier of Chattaroy, Wash., was more complicated.

She did dash off an angry letter to McMorris Rodgers, her congresswoman, in September, but on further exploration Grenier's options were wider than she had thought. She qualified for a subsidized insurance plan through the health care law, an option she opposed philosophically.

Instead, she bought insurance through a Christian ministry that is cheaper and better than her canceled policy. Since her star turn, she has been harassed and mocked by "some pretty mean people," she said.

The "real people" political prop is a durable ingredient in politics, first popularized at the State of the Union address when Ronald Reagan invited Lenny Skutnik, who had dived into the icy Potomac River to rescue victims of a plane crash, to serve as an example of Everyman heroism. It is a trope that every president since has used. But with the continuing fight over the health care reform, it has become a blood sport for both parties. Every real face is fact-checked, every perceived distortion attacked. And real people have been caught in the crossfire.

Democrats say constituent service has yielded to something like constituent exploitation.

"Did McMorris Rodgers do anything to help Bette, her constituent, navigate the options made available to her through the Affordable Care Act and encourage her to find an affordable alternative on Washington state's individual marketplace?" asked the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader. "Or did McMorris Rodgers choose instead to turn her 'into a poster woman for Obamacare victimization?'"

Both Democrats and Republicans have sought out citizens to prove political points, and in the fallout, some of those citizens have suffered a notoriety they never expected.

In April 2012, the White House highlighted Nancy Clark, who runs a small marketing firm in North Conway, N.H., and was a believer in tax credits being offered to small businesses to help cover employees under the health care law.

Last fall, Republicans pointed to Clark's concern that her employees' insurance premiums had shot up by 39 percent and that she was having fits trying to gain access to Healthcare.gov.

In the end, Clark said last week, all her employees were able to obtain health care through the federal marketplace, with better benefits at or below the cost of her old policies. But she was subjected to some remarkable abuse.

"Over the course of my career, I've been quoted here and there, but never have I gotten what I got," she said. "Just a lot of extreme stuff, and it was disappointing and disconcerting" — including vicious postings on the company's Facebook page and calls to the office.

"My wife did spend a little more time Googling my name, along with Eric Cantor," said Bruno Gora, a small-business man in Henrico County, Va., whose canceled health plan was featured by his congressman, Cantor, the House majority leader. "It was all over everywhere."

McMorris Rodgers has taken heat for her story. Pelosi called on her to apologize. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called the tale a lie. The congresswoman said she had only been taking a constituent's letter at face value.

"She had contacted the office. She had said, 'You know what? This is the plan I used to have. It's no longer available, and I'm facing significant premium increases,' and there are many like that," McMorris Rodgers, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, said of Grenier. "I make it a priority to help my constituents every day in my office."

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who on Thursday went to the Senate floor to tell horror stories about the health care law, said, "It's a legitimate question: What are you doing to help? And the answer is: everything possible. But there aren't many avenues to help."

The scrutiny has gone both ways. In 2010, President Barack Obama visited the Falls Church, Va., home of Paul Brayshaw, a hemophiliac, to highlight how the health care law would protect people with expensive medical conditions who would no longer be threatened with lifetime coverage caps from their insurance companies.

But Brayshaw has new worries. The narrow networks of providers in the offered plans could force him to move to another state or travel great distances for care, he said.

"An important gap has been covered for me," he said, "but I'm left still with potentially big unmet needs."

But Republicans have made publicizing horror stories an organized effort, instructing House members to collect, collate and disseminate constituent complaints broadly, as much as Democrats have tried to highlight the program's successes. A website run by McMorris Rodgers has collected hundreds of tales of woe, while House Republicans have been urged to "encourage your constituents to submit feedback of their own experiences."

That has led to a cycle of fact-checking and castigation that has often put constituents under an unwelcome public glare. Grenier said she had gotten phone calls at home from people calling her a deadbeat, a freeloader and worse. Democrats say the aim is to poison the atmosphere, scare constituents away from the health care exchanges and sabotage the law's implementation.

In December, Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio took up the cause of Cornelius Kelly, a New York resident who tried to buy insurance through New York state's health care exchange but found his 18-month-old daughter dropped from the family policy.

The issue turned out to be a clerical error on the Kelly application, not a flaw in the health care law. The fallout has not been pretty. On his own website, Boehner was called a Ku Klux Klansman. On MSNBC, commentators excoriated Kelly, accusing him of concocting a bogus story.